Product Description

Alan Hollinghurst's first novel is a tour de force: a darkly erotic work that centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17031 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review
"'Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny' Daily Telegraph 'The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic debut' - Guardian 'The tautness and energy of Alan Hollinghurst's novel derive from its ambiguous status a it shimmers somewhere between pastoral romance and sulphurous confession, between an affectionate and credible rendering of contemporary mores and lurid melodrama...classic English prose...surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author' - Edmund White, Sunday Times 'Beautifully welds the standard conventions of fiction to a tale of modern transgressions. It tells of impurities with shimmering elegance, of complexities with a camp-fired wit and of truths with a fiction's solid grace' - New York Times Book Review"

From the Publisher
‘Deserves first prize in every category… superbly written, wildly funny’ Daily Telegraph

About the Author
Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), and was selected as one of the Best Young British Novelists 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. He has since written The Spell. He was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995.

Customer Reviews

Brilliantly realised and frequently steamy novel
The world of this book is a rather specific one - that of the male gay Englishman in the 20th century, so if you aren't male, or gay, or English, you might want to pop your head out of the book and gasp for air every so often. Also the graphic descriptions of homosexual congress can make it an uncomfortable read on crowded commuter trains, as I discovered to my cost. Having said that, the book is well, if lavishly, written, and the interlocking tales of danger and desire work together to produce a brilliantly cohesive picture of the evolution of English gay life before the onset of AIDS. The story centres on the relationship between the narrator, a privileged and promiscuous young aristocrat, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, whose life he saves in a public toilet. Nantwich turns out to have had quite an eventful life, as we discover when the narrator is asked to write his biography. The depictions of white boys attracted to black boys are particularly well-handled, and the twists and turns of the plot never take you where you expect. The book's world may be insular, but its immersion in and explication of that world is brilliantly realised.

Sumptuous writing
Like all of Hollinghurst's writing, this book will not suit the average tabloid-reader with a limited vocabulary. If your idea of the acme of writing is Jeffrey Archer be prepared for a far richers and more rewarding experience.

Whilst the story is a racy delve into the darker parts of gay life it is not without its lighter moments. There is drama, comedy and tragedy to be found here.

Although the subject matter is modern the writing seems to come from another altogether more refined era. The author will challenge your broader cultural knowledge with his witty asides and the fullness of the characters. They are fully-rounded and flawed.

just brilliant!
Wow. This is a literary but very erotic book which takes for its subject a hidden English sexual subculture which doesn't often register in mainstream life. I would recommend it to people of all sexualities.

The main focus is on metropolitan gay life in the early 1980s, before AIDS, and the novel's protagonist William Beckwith is suitably hedonistic and frequently debauched. He's not always likeable but the sensuous and sensual character of Hollinghurst's prose keeps you reading as you enter seedy flats, exclusive gentlemen's clubs and darkened caverns.

Hollinghurst's graceful, elegant prose is the work of a mind which has digested a library-load of English prose. Despite its forays into underground porn cinemas and gay cottaging, this is a book which is deeply aware of tradition and the relationship between history and the present; the dead haunt every page.

Highly recommended.